Laboring on Labor Day, perhaps for the penultimate time

I'm required to labor on Labor Day--but not too hard. While my blog takes a holiday, here are my annual listing of Rules for Laboring on Labor Day that I published some years back:

1. Dress down. They can make me teach on Labor Day, but they can't make me dress up.

2. Pack your own picnic. No way I'm eating at my desk when the rest of the world is outside grilling burgers!

3. Don't begrudge the revelers their revels. The people who clean our bathrooms, make our photocopies, and answer our phones work hard for very little money and deserve every minute of their day off. I do not wish they were here working, but I do wish I could join them on their day off.

4. Office hours? Are you kidding me? No one comes to my office hours on a normal day, so what are the chances that anyone will show up on Labor Day?

5. Enjoy the commute. No public school = no school buses holding up traffic, no 20-mile-per-hour zones, and no teens racing around curves on country roads.

6. Be there. Nobody's fooled by the Labor Day flu; if my students are required to be in class on Labor Day, then I'm going to be there with them.

7. Don't try to explain it. I know we have reasons for teaching on Labor Day, and some of them may even be valid ("We can't shortchange Monday labs!"), but the real reason we teach on Labor Day is that we've never been sufficiently motivated to change it.  

Stressing out my students

This class is like stress therapy said one of my Nature Writing students, but I fear that my next class might disagree. The Nature Writing students have been talking about how we frame nature, so I gave each of them a rubber band and asked them to go outside and frame some part of nature within the rubber band and then observe that small space for a minimum of ten minutes. The time limit was the hardest part--if nothing much was happening in the patch of moss a student observed, it was easy to get distracted. But they kept at it and brought back some good insights about observation, including that it's helpful to employ all the senses. Progress!

My next class will be more stressful. The first-year seminar is designed to equip students with the skills they need to succeed in college, and today the emphasis is on discussion skills. In Monday's class I gave them a photocopy of the first two chapters of Tara Westover's Educated and I showed them methods of annotation to help them retain what they've read--and then I gave them some time in class to work on it. (No AI involved, but there's nothing stopping them from getting an AI summary of other parts of the text that we didn't touch in class Monday.) 

In today's class, the students will be expected to discuss their reading--for points. Each student will be expected to ask a question or make a comment about a particular passage in the text, and I'll be up front putting a check mark next to the name of each student who contributes to the discussion. Two check marks equal ten points, the maximum available for this assignment.

I've never tried to quantify student engagement in discussion so literally, but this is where we've arrived in higher education. My biggest problem will be that I haven't yet learned all their names, so I've printed out a seating chart and I'll put all their names on it this morning. Sure, I could ask them to wear name tags, but I'd never be able to see them from up front. So seating chart it is. 

The thing about teaching two brand-new (to me) classes is that everything is an experiment. Some experiments result in enlightenment and joy and stress therapy while others may prove more frustrating. Either way, it's a learning experience, and learning, after all, is why we're here.  

The theme photo for the Nature Writing class. How do we frame nature?

 

Countdown to class time

Well I remembered to wear earrings and makeup this morning, so this must be my first day of fall classes. Last week I bought four new shirts suitable for the classroom, but I didn't wear any of them this morning because I'm leery of new clothes on the first day of class. The last thing I want when I first meet my new students is a wardrobe malfunction, so I'm sticking with something tried and tested.

Neither of my syllabi have been tested before, which makes this first day a little nerve-wracking. Where have I messed up? What have I left out? The last thing I want is to have students point out a gaping hole in my assignment schedule while I'm standing in front of class on the first day.

If I can stand up at all, that is. Yesterday I twisted my knee while walking across a parking lot at the mall, so if anyone asks why I'm limping more than usual, I'll say I suffered a shopping-related injury. Hurt myself while searching for a new shower curtain for my recently renovated bathroom. (Whom shall I sue?) Rumor has it that the elevator in my building has been fixed, but nevertheless I'm going to try walking up the stairs. The last thing I want on the first day of class is to be trapped in an elevator with doors that won't open.

I have 24 minutes to overcome those first-day jitters that never seem to go away, and then I'll be upstairs opening doors to learning for a bunch of students, new and old. We can do this! First, though, I have to get up the steps. 

Got some color in there!

 

Ready, ish

The big question on everyone's lips today, of course, is Are you ready for classes to start tomorrow? And my answer is yes, ish. 

How can I start teaching without making a million photocopies and posting writing prompts to my Canvas pages and printing out my rosters? My first class is Friday so I ought to be able to do all that tomorrow, but instead I'll be spending some quality time in the dentist's chair in the morning and getting a mammogram in the afternoon. What possessed me to schedule so much, um, discomfort on the day before I return to the classroom? I suspect temporary insanity. At least I hope it's temporary, but how would I know?

So I'll be doing all those first-day preps today, but how can I concentrate on syllabi and prompts and rosters when my office is still in Summer Mess Mode? I vacuumed last week (because of course we have to vacuum our own offices) but my eye keeps catching the untidy stacks of books that surround me. How am I supposed to work on my computer when all those books need to go back on the shelves in proper order? I need to start the semester with a clean office (because yes, I am that neurotic) but it's not going to clean itself.

More than anything, though, I need to clean up my attitude. I've been doing some loud complaining lately, and some of it has produced results that will benefit my colleagues--small things like being permitted to use a particular technology that works reliably in place of one that doesn't. In fact I'm beginning to wonder whether, in my final full year of teaching, the greatest gift I can give the institution is the willingness to complain about certain situations in order to improve conditions not just for me but also for those who can't risk alienating the Powers that Be.

So yes, I'm ready to complain, and I'm ready to make photocopies and post prompts and print rosters. First, though, someone needs to put those books away. Volunteers?  

 

Who stacked all those books there?

 

Peoples is peoples, says Pete

A few observations from a busy week on campus:

If I carry a pair of freshly-picked cantaloupes into the library and a human being's nose catches  a whiff of the scent, I will not be carrying any cantaloupes when I leave the library, which is a good thing since my resident garden guru has just picked a dozen ripe cantaloupes. They don't keep well, you know? I'm happy to try making some cantaloupe-and-ginger sorbet this weekend, but my experience has been that frozen cantaloupe loses massive amounts of flavor.

If I walk into a meeting expecting a meaningful contribution from someone who has previously demonstrated an unwillingness to contribute anything meaningful or even, often, to show up, then I'm expecting too much. Can't expect a tiger to change its stripes just because I said Pretty-please.

If one person emails to ask politely for the kind of help and training I'm accustomed to providing while another person sends an obnoxious email berating me for not having already provided such help to certain people who never asked, I'm answering the polite email first, every time. Why do some people go straight to the nuclear option? I'm here to help, but don't scream at me for failing to help someone who never asked for my help! After all, I'm only human.

If I'm already having trouble getting to sleep, staying asleep, and keeping alert in the afternoons when we haven't even gotten to the stressful part of the semester yet--you know, the whole teaching two new classes thing--then it's going to be a very long and exhausting semester. I need to develop some better relaxation skills--but I'd better do it quickly before everything gets any crazier than it already is. Hurry up and relax! Nope, that didn't work.

It's always nice to be reminded that human nature continues to be entirely what it has always been: human. Or, as Kermit the Frog learns in Pete's Luncheonette, Peoples is peoples.

Couldn't have said it better myself.  

Good work if you can get it

I'd like to issue an invitation to everyone who has ever congratulated me on getting the whole summer off from work: Please come and watch what I'm doing today and then tell me I'm not working.

Granted, I'm not required to work outdoors in wretched heat or do any heavy lifting or crawl around on the floor of a horrible old bathroom or even punch a time clock, though if I were I'd be tempted to follow the example of Mooch in the 1979 film Breaking Away when he punches the timeclock--literally. I may have my moments of metaphorically throwing punches at certain people responsible for the mindless pettifogging procedures I am required to follow, but my job has never compelled me to throw an actual punch. 

But I have punched a lot of keys and crunched a lot of numbers and I have the eye fatigue to prove it. This fall I'm teaching two almost-brand-new classes, classes I've taught before in other incarnations; however, the contents and expectations for both courses have changed so much that I may as well be starting from scratch.

I last taught an upper-level class on Nature Writing more than a decade ago--as a summer online course. I like to use recent examples in upper-level writing classes, so most of the readings I assigned previously are no longer relevant (except Annie Dillard's 1982 essay "Total Eclipse," which everyone interested in writing about nature ought to read). The eight-week assignment structure for the online course doesn't translate well to a 14-week face-to-face semester, and I no longer have access to the previous course management system so I can't just copy and paste assignments and content into the new shell. So I have spent a lot of time tracking down appropriate readings, scanning them into the system, and organizing them into a reasonable class structure.

And then the first-year seminar I'm teaching is very different from the version I last taught several years ago, so this summer I've had to shift topics, choose a new text, and create an assignment structure that includes certain types of required assignments plus a whole range of activities requiring students to show mastery of the skills they need to succeed in college. These skills will be taught by the Peer Mentor, an upper-level student assigned to my class, but I'll be the one collecting and grading the required college skills assignments. 

First, though, I need to develop an assignment structure that makes some sort of sense, motivating students to do all the things even though many of the things simply aren't comparable. I mean, sure, I have no problem creating a meaningful prompt and rubric for the required annotated bibliography and research paper, but how do I balance those demands against, for instance, an assignment requiring students to print out an email on a campus printer or come up with a list of potential classes to take in the spring? Those can be low-stakes assignments, but if the stakes are too low, the students won't do them.

So I've spent a lot of time writing prompts and shuffling due dates and moving readings and activities around on my draft syllabi, and now I'm uploading assignments and files and rubrics to the course management system. Three solid hours this morning just trying to get one class's assignments mostly loaded to Canvas, and I haven't even started uploading files or developing detailed lesson plans.

Now my eyes are blurry from staring at the screen and my wrist hurts from all the pointing and clicking. (Ah, the humanity!) But on the other hand, I get to do my work sitting down in a comfy chair, with a cold drink at my elbow and no snarky supervisor looking over my shoulder. Granted, Bathroom Dude is just a few feet away putting the finishing touches on our guest bathroom while listening to a very loud podcast dealing with supernatural phenomena and conspiracy theories (somehow combining interest in the Shroud of Turin, sea monsters, and Florida bog people), but anyone willing to spend the morning on his hands and knees installing new flooring and fixtures in my horrible old bathroom is allowed to listen to whatever he wants to.

Bathroom Dude is a bit of an inspiration: if he hasn't punched the face right off the time clock after all those hours in that cramped room, then I think I can keep on pointing and clicking for as long as it takes to get the work done, all summer long.

Spam(a lot) and eggs(tra anxiety)

Early this morning I walked down the hill and through the woods in my nightgown and robe so I could take a shower in my son's apartment. At our house the tub has been installed in the guest bathroom but the water hasn't been turned on, and the lovely new shower has been installed in our master bathroom but we can't use it for 24 hours while the silicon cures, whatever that means. Yesterday I made several visits to my son's apartment just to use his bathroom, because our guest bathroom doesn't have a toilet yet while the master bathroom was occupied by a working man armed with power tools and caulking guns. 

So far it's been an up-and-down kind of week. The bathroom project is on target to be finished by Friday and the master bathroom will be fully functional this afternoon, so progress is being made! But obstacles keep arising, at home and elsewhere.

That important report I need to submit by the end of the month? I finally received the information I need to finish the report. Where has that info been hiding all this time? Well I'm not naming names here, but the essential information has been sitting in a certain administrator's spam folder since the middle of June. Our campus email system deletes spam items after 90 days, so it's a good thing I nagged someone into looking for the data!

Am I the only one who regularly practices spam folder hygiene? My Inbox Zero obsession requires me to scroll through spam at least twice a week to rescue anything that doesn't belong there and delete the rest, but maybe that's just a symptom of my personal neurosis. Apparently plenty of people are able to stroll calmly through their lives without ever wondering what valuable messages might have been inappropriately relegated to spam. Call it Spam Blindness--the ability to ignore a bulging spam folder without any qualms whatsoever.

At home I sometimes see signs of Dirt Blindness or Clutter Blindness--the ability to walk blithely past a mess without the slightest urge to clean it up. Again, I'm not naming names, but I long ago gave up on saying "If you see something amiss, just clean it up" to people for whom "amiss" is a foreign concept. I'm not a clean freak and I can live comfortably with a modicum of clutter, but certain types of disorder ring alarm bells in my brain and make my whole body vibrate with anxiety. Another symptom of my personal neurosis, no doubt, but if that little pile of dirt at the edge of the hallway insists on interfering with my sleep, you'd better believe I'll nag the person who left it there--or clean it up myself.

Maybe the presence in my house of men with power tools has made me a little more anxious than usual this week. I'm delighted at the work they're doing (on time and under budget, so far) and I'll be even more delighted when it's done, but it's hard to concentrate on important tasks with strangers in the bathroom and tools shrieking at all hours of the day. And then when I need the bathroom, I have to find the keys, find my shoes, and trek down through the woods to a bathroom that's suffering from its own special form of neglect. Right now it feels as if everything is a little bit amiss, but I lack the ability to put it back to rights and no amount of nagging will make this project get done any faster, so I'm just biting my tongue, biding my time, and trying to live through the current disorder.

Brain the size of a planet and they've got me pushing piddling paperwork

I'm sitting in my campus office clickety-clicking on the keyboard while some primitive part of my brain cowers in fear on the floor of the starship Heart of Gold and a disembodied voice keeps saying, "We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem."

How can my body be back at work while my mind feels stuck in a Douglas Adams novel? I have a list as long as my arm of tasks I must complete pronto--don't panic!--but I lack the information needed to complete them. I'm looking at a grant application on which all the dates are off by a full year, but changing them would require me to complete a massive number of tasks after I've retired. I've been given a date for the New Faculty Orientation I'm supposed to plan but have thus far received no indication that we have hired any new faculty. I need to file a final report about a previous grant but cannot get access to the data required for filing the report. And I need to finish my syllabi but I'm still not clear on exactly what I'm supposed to be doing in the new version of the first-year seminar.

Stymied by these impossibilities, I instead devote time to a piddling bit of paperwork that doesn't matter in the least: writing my annual review, a document that will be read by exactly one person (my wonderful department chair). There is literally nothing at stake: No chance that I'll be fired without cause in my final year of teaching and no more rewards available for good work. But, unlike my other projects, I have access to all the information I need to complete my annual review and so that's what I'll do. Somewhere in my extensive list of the past year's accomplishments I'll tuck away the complaint of an iconic Douglas Adams character, Marvin the morose android: "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper."

But at least the work I'll do today is mostly harmless. Not much else I can say about it.

I'm melting, I'm melting!

The problem with working in overly air conditioned offices is that stepping outside the building feels like walking into a solid wall of heat. Yesterday I was carrying heavy things across campus and I honestly wanted to lie down and melt into the pavement--much easier than trying to breathe in that heat.

But I felt more sorry for the very competent and highly qualified job candidate who gave a fine presentation yesterday. We'd been warned in the morning that the College would try to save energy by cutting back on the air conditioning in the hottest part of the day--exactly when this visiting candidate's presentation was scheduled. 

The room was crowded. 

The candidate was wearing a long-sleeved dress shirt and tie.

The presentation, as mentioned, was excellent, but I was distracted by the progress of the sweat marks slowly spreading down this poor man's shirt. By the end of the hour he looked as if someone had doused him with champagne in premature celebration--but the fact that he performed so valiantly under hostile circumstances suggests that he's equipped to endure the trials of administrative service.

I, on the other hand, am preparing to endure the trials of administrative gobbledegook. This morning I'm presenting some committee-constructed prose to the Powers That Be and steeling myself for their responses. Earlier in this process, very passionate people told me, "If you take out the phrase 'liberal arts,' you'll destroy the College," while others said, "If you include the phrase 'liberal arts,' you'll destroy the College." Can't please both of those parties, and it's wearing me out trying.

But at least I don't have to present this prose in a sweltering room. In fact, given the indoor conditions in campus buildings, I'd better take a sweater. 

Confusion, kerfuffle, and kestrel

Our local newspaper presented the following conundrum of a headline on the front page the other day:

Confusion on sensor
plane's abilities delayed
response in Ohio train
derailment, report says 

Confusion is the right word. I've read the whole article and I still can't quite parse the headline's meaning, but here's a hint: the main verb is delayed and its subject is confusion.

Confusion reigned at my house yesterday when a box full of air fryer appeared on our front porch with no label or indication of where it had come from or what it was doing there. Later in the evening a neighbor called to ask whether an errant air fryer had entered our ken. It was needed for a bridal shower (?) but someone had dropped it off at the wrong house. Mystery solved, and I no longer have a big ol' box of air fryer on my sofa. (We kept the air fryer comfy during its brief sojourn.)

Meanwhile on campus, a massive kerfuffle has arisen over, among other things, errant boxes, asbestos abatement, and flooring. Massive amounts of money are being poured into replacing old floors and removing asbestos from the old science buildings. Faculty members have been asked to remove everything from their offices, labs, and classrooms all at once--with no designated location to stash all that stuff. A pile of boxes got dropped off in one department office but they were intended for faculty in both buildings, so people were scrambling to locate their promised boxes. Good thing our science departments get along well or we could have ended up with an all-out science war, with the chemists constructing incendiary devices while the biologists lobbed bits and bobs from the cadaver lab and the physicists created a black hole to suck up all the boxes and detritus piled in the hallways.

Finally, Facebook tells me that I took a photo of a kestrel giving me the side-eye eight years ago this week. (Good thing I've outsourced my memory functions to Facebook or I'd never remember anything important, like the fact that I encountered the kestrel along the side of a road on the perimeter of The Wilds and that it looked stunned, as if it had been struck by a car, but flew off after I'd snapped a few pix.)

I see this kestrel every day--in a photo on our bedroom wall and on my phone's lock screen--and for years it has served as my profile photo on our college email system, because why not? I'd rather look at a photo of a kestrel giving the side-eye than of me looking like, well, me, and besides, it confuses people in a not unpleasant way. If we must live with confusion, let's make it the non-unpleasant kind.

No diners for the feast of words

It's not so much the immense waste of time I resent. I mean, I've mastered so  many different ways of wasting time that this new one is just a drop in the time-wasting bucket, so to speak. No, what I resent is that from the start of this project a little voice in a distant corner of my brain kept telling me that it was all a big boondoggle unlikely to come to fruition--and yet I still allowed myself to get sucked into the vortex and devote hours of work to making it happen. 

Which it won't. Happen. As I should have known all along. And this is why people don't volunteer to do things, said one of my colleagues, and I concur.

But is all that time spent in preparing for an event that will not now occur really wasted? 

Years ago (and I know I've told this story before) when I was an adjunct at another institution, I spent some time on campus photocopying syllabi a few days before classes started and several colleagues asked why I was there. "I didn't think you were teaching this semester," they said, but I insisted that I'd been hired to teach a British Literature Survey class. Someone must have alerted the Dean because I arrived home to find a message on my answering machine saying oops, sorry, forgot to tell you we're not allowing adjuncts to teach literature classes anymore. I called at once and pointed out the injustice of failing to inform me that I wouldn't be teaching the class until I'd already done all the preparation, and the Dean told me, "Don't worry, you'll be able to use that work in some other class."

My time hadn't been wasted, she insisted, but in fact I never did use that work in another class because the topic was outside my area of expertise. Still, perhaps the exercise in assembling a syllabus and lesson plans for the course served me well elsewhere. All I knew was that I was out of a job and stuck with a pile of photocopies representing a mass of wasted time.

Nothing we do for children is ever wasted, insists Garrison Keillor, and I'm happy to substitute students for children. But what about non-students? What about the course (or program or, I don't know, summer creative writing day camp for high school students, if such a thing might exist) that gets cancelled at the last minute due to lack of enrollment? It's hard to feel good about preparing a hearty and delicious feast and then having no one show up to devour it.

But on the other hand, I now have a bunch of unexpected free time next week. I ought to find someone meaningful to do with that time, but somehow it would seem more appropriate to simply let it go to waste.  

A short cut to the AOA department

Summertime and the living is easily on the way to driving me bonkers. Fun weekend with the grandkids! Lazy Sunday afternoon nap! Monday mowing and cooking and sitting around reading--perfect! And then comes Tuesday.

Don't even get me started.

Today I have been running from pillar to post while trying to wrangle mounds of pettifogging claptrap standing in the way of a grant project. It's an exciting project--five-day Creative Writing day camp for local high schools students funded by the Department of Job and Family Services--and I'm working alongside some very creative and energetic people. 

But! 

I have to reserve rooms, but another organization has reserved EVERY ROOM in my building for three out of the five days of our camp. So I have to find space in another building, except I'm not familiar with room numbers in all our buildings so I have to walk around looking at rooms to see if they'll suit our purposes, and then I have to walk back to the administration building to confer with the room-reservation guru, who fortunately keeps a well-stocked candy dish on her desk. (Or, maybe, unfortunately.)

The grant was approved last week and the camp starts on June 9, so we need to buy some supplies; however, I can't submit a purchase order or use the College Amazon account until an account number is assigned to the grant. Unfortunately, the grant paperwork has not yet made its way to the person in charge of assigning an account number, so I have to email the grant-writer and all the grant-approvers to try to unclog the pipeline and get the paperwork flowing smoothly.

Further, at our planning meeting this morning I assembled a list of about a dozen questions that can be answered only by the people who normally inhabit three offices whose doors today are tightly shut and locked. Out of the office, apparently. I mean, it's as if these people had lives or, I don't know, summer vacations. Let's hope they're watching their email.

My plan was to spend one long morning on campus taking care of every little pettifogging detail, but all those dead ends and closed doors mean I'll have to come back and try again another day. Next time I'll head straight to the Department of Aggravation, Obfuscation, and Angst. All roads lead there eventually, so why not take the short cut? 

Applause all around

I came out of Commencement Saturday with sore hands from applauding so much, and then I wanted to walk right over to the peony patch and applaud some more. How could those tight little buds burst into such massive gorgeous blossoms so quickly?

I'd like to ask the same thing about the students I clapped for as they received their diplomas. (Well, their diploma cases--the real thing comes later, after grades are submitted. Which reminds me of a great line from the Commencement speech: when he graduated from Marietta College in 1970, our speaker's diploma case contained only a bill for $2.48 for library fines--"And I don't remember ever checking out a book." It was a great speech and when I get the link I'll post it.) 

It seems like only yesterday that these bright-eyed students came toddling into my first-year classes wondering what the word syllabus might mean, and now here they are tottering across the stage on platform shoes and out the door toward jobs and adventures and real life. Go, you! Here's a round of applause!

And how did I celebrate my sudden burst of freedom? With birds and wildflowers, of course, and by diving into a good book. I have some projects around the house that need attention and my summer campus meetings start tomorrow, but right now I'm spending every spare moment doing as close to nothing as possible. Go, me! Here's a round of applause!

No need to get all shouty about it

It seems the semester just started last week, but what's left to do now? A final exam, some student presentations, a few meetings, and a whole mess of grading. I'm tempted to say It's all over but the shouting, but at this point I hope people keep their shouting to themselves--unless it's happy shouting, which I will accept any time.

We had some happy shouting today at the final meeting of the First-Year Faculty Support Group, which I've been leading since last August when I met all these colleagues at New Faculty Orientation. Orientation is a pain to organize even when the incoming group is small, but this group has been such a blast! I've had the opportunity to help them understand important topics--how our faculty governance system works, how to interpret student evaluations, how to troubleshoot teaching problems--and I've enjoyed observing teaching and encouraging them to do great work. Today's meeting was all about sharing our fabulous experiences, which led to much laughter and a little happy shouting. This group has been so helpful, they said, which I found encouraging because planning meetings is not my favorite thing to do and I'm glad when it works well.

That will be one of my summer projects--planning orientation and arranging mentors for new faculty members and adjuncts--but first we have to hire some people. I suspect that this fall's group will be small because who can afford new faculty members? Still, we have some holes to fill in a few key departments, so I'll make sure they get the training they need.

Also on this summer's project list: write the final report for the grant I administered, provide a professional development activity for staff members, help plan a summer creative writing day camp for high school students, update the official Syllabus Template to include specific language concerning use of Artificial Intelligence, plan fall pedagogy workshops, oversee Writing Wednesdays, and work on my own writing projects.

And plan my fall classes! Neither course is entirely new but I haven't taught Nature Writing in ages and I'm pursuing an entirely new topic for the freshman seminar. Yes, it's a little disappointing that our senior faculty member in the English department has no literature class to teach this fall, but I'll manage. I intend to have lots of fun with these two fall courses and then enjoy my last couple of semesters before retirement--and then it will really be all over but the shouting.

Swinging out over the ravine

"Is there an artist in the class?" I asked, and fortunately there was, which is a good thing because when I try to draw anything on the whiteboard, no one can tell what it's supposed to be. This is true: On a handout I use regularly in composition classes I drew a picture of a cow, but students always ask what it's supposed to be and one of them guessed it might be an olive floating over a pool table. 

But today before class a student complied with my request and drew on the whiteboard a nervous-looking boy swinging on a grape vine over a dark ravine. Would the vine hold? Would he go flying into the unknown or land on solid ground? The boy is Sarty Snopes, the story is "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner, and the references to liminal space get more extreme as the plot progresses: the boy is suspended between blood and justice, swinging on a vine over a dark ravine, torn in two by teams of horses, and finally stepping alone into a dark wood with no idea where he's going.

I love teaching "Barn Burning" even though Faulkner poses problems for most of my students. "It's just confusing," they tell me, but I ask them why Faulkner didn't work a little harder to clarify the situation. Why not employ an omniscient narrator to explain exactly what's happening at any given moment? Why reveal the story through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy who often hasn't a clue? That's where we start the discussion. We follow a meandering path through the story but always end up lost, facing that dark wood, alone but together.

But as much as I love teaching "Barn Burning," this morning I made the difficult decision to cut Faulkner out of my American Novel class in the fall. The class focuses on narrative innovations so I've always included The Sound and the Fury, but I fear that even my English majors lack the patience and reading skills to tackle the Benjy chapter. I needed to cut the reading list down from seven books to six just to accommodate the kinds of reading and oral communication skills I'm supposed to emphasize under the new Communication Proficiency designation, and after much consideration, Faulkner seemed like the right book to cut.

And the thing is, I made that decision without even knowing whether that course will earn the Communication Proficiency designation. I hope those decisions will come down before students start registering for fall courses, but meanwhile, I have to submit my book orders, which means I had to make decisions about the reading list based on incomplete information. Which seems, at the moment, to be the way we do things around here. 

I'd like someone to draw a diagram of how our campus systems are functioning right now with so many changes and so many offices remaining unstaffed, but I fear we don't have an artist skilled enough to produce something legible. Instead, I hold tightly to the grapevine as it swings out over the dark ravine and hope it doesn't drop me into the great unknown.

Spring Break souvenirs

I saw a student this morning with arms so sunburned that if she stood outside on a dark night people might mistake her for the Blood Moon. She brought back a memorable souvenir of Spring Break, but I don't want to be around when the sunburn starts to peel.

A student in my American Lit class brought back an impressive record--ten straight wins in softball! What a way to start the season. I watched the baseball home opener last week before I left for my Spring Break road trip and while our baseball team isn't winning ten straight anything, they played a gem of a game, pulling a victory out of nowhere. It was a gorgeous sunny day and I could have ended up with sunburn if I hadn't sat in the shade. 

What souvenirs did I bring home from Spring Break? Three boxes of Girl Scout cookies and some photos of my granddaughter competing in the regional spelling bee and my grandson in the Pinewood Derby. And photos of herons. Lots of herons.

Mostly my Spring Break souvenirs are intangible--feelings and memories and random wishes. I feel happy about how we've managed to maintain a satisfying relationship with our adult kids, and I cherish the memory of the youngest imp reading me the story she wrote and illustrated in which three friends pursue a quest for adventure and bring back treasure--but only after asking their parents' permission. I loved to see her trying to read a book and practice the piano at the same time, although I know that's not the textbook way to develop piano skills.

And I wish I'd done a little more work last week so I wouldn't be rushing around trying to print out documents and prepare for meetings this morning. I wish I had answers to questions people keep asking--not just the big questions about the future of the College but the niggling little ones like am I allowed to talk to a coach about a student's academic performance if the coach is also the student's parent? 

And I truly wish I did not have to stand up in front of the faculty meeting this afternoon and tell them that the magic wand they're asking for doesn't exist--the software that will reliably identify Artificial Intelligence with 100 percent accuracy so that we don't have to rely on our own instincts and reasoning skills.

More than anything, what I wish for after Spring Break is more Spring Break, but I would probably feel differently if I'd brought back the kind of sunburn I saw on students this morning. Some of us have clearly had enough leisure. Time to get back to work! 

I don't remember buying a ticket for this ride

Once upon a time my family got stuck on a log flume ride, all five of us, Mom Dad and three adolescents crammed into one big fake log that came to an abrupt stop halfway up a steep climb. I don't recall how long we sat there before an attendant came along to release us from our uncomfortable stasis, but I remember wishing the ride would just for heaven's sake get moving--I didn't much care where.

It is the nature of roller coasters to swing from extreme highs to gut-dropping lows with a lot of wild whirling in between, so I guess I should be delighted that the roller-coaster my emotions have recently been riding keeps moving, even if some of the places it takes me are uncomfortable.

Just in the past week I have emerged from a class after teaching "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" so exhilarated that I felt like I was floating down the hallway, and I later entered another class so full of despair that I could barely keep from crying in front of my students. I had made the mistake of watching the video of Zelenskyy's visit to the Oval Office just before class. (My maiden name was Zelesky. My grandparents left Lithuania to flee the Bolsheviks. I hate to see the underdog get bullied.)

Last week I met with a student who admitted that he did not recognize many of the words in the writing he had submitted as his own, and later I read a set of student essays that filled me with awe over my students' creativity (goslings that look like lumps of dryer-lint!). I need to read some mediocre pieces just to provide a bit of respite between the highs and lows.

On Sunday, in response to a challenge from a former colleague, I finally put on paper a draft of a personal essay I've been gnawing over for years, which took me to a very dark place where I once felt hopelessly stuck, but writing about it provided a liberating sense of accomplishment. It's an early draft with a chunk missing from the middle, but it says something I need to say and opens the door to further exploration, further highs and lows. 

And today I face a pile of administrative claptrap related to a new project that will either make a significant difference in our campus culture or turn into a massive waste of time and energy, but even as I was kicking myself for getting dragged into this thankless endeavor, I received an email message full of praise for an academic essay I published last year, the kind of praise academic writing rarely receives, and the praise is going to be published for everyone to see. (You'd better believe I'll share the link when it becomes available, shameless self-promotion or not.) I promised myself I wouldn't cry but I'm keeping the tissues handy.

And the hits just keep coming--the ups and downs, the long slow climb before the endless fall, the twists and turns that keep me wondering where I'll end up next, but at this point I'm just glad the roller-coaster keeps moving forward. Better to keep moving than to get stuck. After all, it's not the twists and turns that kill you--it's the sudden stop at the end. 

Raise a glass to sheer survival

I could count up all the things that made this an awful week, from the snow that slicked up my road again to the deer that ran in front of my car and caused me to slam on the brakes in a way that wrenched my back, not to mention the all-day rain and gray skies and the impossibility of sleeping through my husband's night-time coughing fits, plus an annoying allergic reaction that made my ankles feel like they were on fire all day long for two days straight, but it's Friday so let's think about happier things. 

Snow-covered trees along the icy river made for a beautiful drive the other morning. Despite my three (!) separate encounters with deer this week and my close encounter with a cliffside during a dangerous skid, I am still alive and kicking--which is easier now that my ankles are done burning and itching and swelling up until they feel as if they'll burst.

The skies may have been gray for a few days but in our house the Christmas cacti are blooming beautifully--again!--and my husband brought home a lovely bunch of tulips to brighten things up. The tulips echo some hues on our current jigsaw puzzle, a collection of colorful succulents challenging our puzzle-solving ability--and what a great feeling to insert a piece that transforms a chaotic blob into something beautiful.

This has been a cupcake-and-cake intensive week, with campus gatherings for a teaching workshop, the installation of our interim president, and the College's 190th birthday party, where I cheered on colleagues earning prizes for good work and took home a little bling myself. Most of these prizes were cancelled last year but the nominations were resubmitted this year, which is how I ended up walking home with a Research Prize for the Teaching Comedy book. Plus a cupcake!

And now all I have to do is get through two classes today and this complicated week will finally be over, so let's raise a glass to anti-lock brakes, anti-itch cream, tulips, cacti, and cupcakes.